When You're Not Part of a Campaign, Everyone Looks Like a Target
Nov 13, 2026
Build A Better World Quote by Garden City Library is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 / Cropped from original
Build A Better World Quote by Garden City Library is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 / Cropped from original
There's been an overwhelming amount of conversation this past week around House House's use of AI in their game Big Walk and how some jurors from the Independent Games Festival awards decided to not vote for any game with AI. The past couple of days has felt like a collective scream from so many people across the industry for many, many different reasons and it's honestly been hard to take in. I've been dispirited and frustrated and so I wanted to write about why that is and how I think we can improve our collective response to situations like this in the future. We can learn and do better.
If you're not up to speed, Aftermath covered the initial situation well and I've seen some good responses from other folks (which aren't necessary to read for the purposes of my essay):
While all of these analyses have been welcome, none of them have really talked about why this response has been so chaotic, exhausting, and emotionally charged. It's left a lot of people feeling confused and hurt, and I think I can help explain some of that.
I'm coming at this as someone who has a lot of first hand experience with incredibly difficult and long-term organizing campaigns, which I think are quite relevant for the fight against AI. I co-founded the IWGB Game Workers Union in the UK and have been a very active member for 8 years and co-founded No Games For Genocide to help end the games industry's complicity in the genocide of Palestinians.
What the response this week has shown me is how difficult it is to effectively build a coalition to win demands around AI, how an organized campaign against AI in the games industry could help make that easier, and how those two hurdles cause people to treat every situation as if it's a must-win.
It's worth taking a beat to understand the basics of this situation. I am using my own personal thought process here, but I think this likely applies for a lot of other people as well.
Did House House publicly agree to avoid using AI?
No.
Is there a coordinated and well known games industry wide anti-AI campaign?
No.
Am I in direct community with the people in House House that used AI?
No.
Am I part of a shared movement with House House to limit the use of or abolish AI?
No.
Have I tried to figure out what need House House was experiencing that made them feel like using AI was the best decision and provide alternatives so they don't feel the need to use AI in the future?
No.
Am I upset that House House used AI?
Yes.
Why do I expect House House to not use AI?
They have aligned themselves with the BDS boycott of Microsoft, so I assumed they would also be anti-AI.
In summary, a group of game developers made a choice to use AI, I choose not to use AI because I think it should be destroyed, and I am upset because I assumed they would make the same choices I would make. I've never spoken with them about AI and in fact have never spoken with them at all. I've not reached out to understand their needs and help fulfill them in some way that doesn't use AI. In short, I don't know the folks who work at House House and I've not done anything to help avoid or improve this situation and yet I'm still frustrated.
What I've learned from almost a decade of organizing in movements is that how I feel and the actions I choose to take afterwards are two very different things. Mariame Kaba, an organizer with decades of experience, said, “As a young organizer, one of the best skills to develop is discernment.” I hope the following questions clarify why that's important in this situation.
Who is to blame for why I'm upset with AI?
The AI companies, specifically their executives. They are the root cause of this situation, not House House.
Is House House a key target in a pressure campaign to stop the use of AI?
No. They are merely a well known and liked company which has heightened visibility due to this current situation.
Are other companies being questioned in the same way that House House is?
No.
Are there other game companies that publicly use AI much more than House House?
Yes. Many large game companies have publicly stated AI is a core aspect of their business.
Would House House be willing to participate in a campaign against AI?
I don't know as I've not spoken with them about it, but I would imagine it's something they'd be willing to have a conversation around if people were to approach them in a calm and curious manner.
What action do I want House House to take to make up for this perceived misstep?
An apology? Rip out the code and rewrite it? Not use AI again? Unclear. I would like them to be anti-AI, but I've also not taken the time to speak with them and get them on board with a campaign against it. I believe it's less than helpful to tell someone they should behave differently while being completely unwilling to help them.
I think this situation has blown up so much because of multiple things at once:
In her book We Will Not Cancel Us, adrienne maree brown captured this perfectly:
What we do now is find out someone or some group has done (or may have done) something out of alignment with our values. Some of the transgressions are small - saying something is fucked-up, being disrespectful in a group process. Some are massive - false identity, sexual assault.
We then tear that person or group to shreds in a way that affirms our values. We create memes, reducing someone to the laughing stock of the Internet that day. We write think-pieces on how we are not like that person, and obviously wouldn't make the same mistakes they have made. We deconstruct them as thinkers, activists, groups, bodies, partners, parents, children - finding all of the contradictions and limitations and shining bright light on them. When we are satisfied that that person or group is destroyed, we move on. Or sometimes we just move on because the next scandal has arrived, the smell of fresh meat overwhelming our interest in finishing the takedown.
People often respond to the use of AI in the same way they respond to issues with gambling and alcohol - as personal failings rather than systemic issues. While House House may have contributed a small amount of harm by using AI, I've not really seen anyone talking about how to address that harm, prevent it in the future, or understand House House's needs and provide alternatives.
Getting House House to not use AI will not by itself meaningfully get us to a world where AI doesn't harm us in the ways it currently does now. House House isn't one of the main targets to stop the proliferation of AI and they're not the root cause of it. It's clear from the public's response there's no space or grace for people to make mistakes and learn from them. Every perceived infraction like this is pounced upon in a way that feels punitive rather than helping work through it in a transformative way.
That is a large part of why I think this whole situation feels so bad - the public response is not proportional to the amount of harm caused by House House's actions and people generally aren't willing to help rectify the harm or prevent it from happening again in the future.
So how can people learn from this and avoid it the next time a beloved person or game company admits to doing something they don't like? One answer that I like is to build relationships, communities, coalitions, campaigns, and ultimately a movement.
Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning listed out these four key cornerstones for any movement in their book Re:Imagining Change:
- Goal - What are we trying to achieve? What is the specific change we are trying to make?
- Audience - Who are the specific groups of people that we most need to reach and persuade?
- Target - Who is the decision-maker that can make this desired change happen?
- Constituency - Who is our base? The organized groups of people or communities who we already work with, represent or share common interests with.
The two most popular ways of doing this in the games industry are through unions and advocacy organizations. When building up either of these types of organizations from the ground up, you talk with people who you think might want to join the cause. You bring people in slowly and discuss and hash out what you want to do, what you don't want to do, and why. You build a strategy with the cornerstones as a foundation, grow your constituency, encourage your audience to join or boost your campaign, so you can effectively pressure your target to achieve your goal.
Game workers have been organizing in unions for the past decade and have already won several protections around AI:
This is, by far, the most effective way to push back against AI in the industry because each and every worker can do this for their own workplace in ways that match their specific contexts. One difficult trade-off of doing this workplace by workplace is that each group of workers needs to figure out the cornerstones of their campaign and that can be time consuming and stressful.
A way to mitigate this is to have an industry-wide campaign, although it's important to remember this industry-wide campaign does not replace the company by company union campaigns - it supports and bolsters them.
As an example of an advocacy organization, No Games For Genocide created a pledge made of four sets of concrete actions so it's easy for people to take action in their respective areas. We did not capture all possible actions people could take and there are many we think would be good for people to do above and beyond what we suggested. It's impossible to be fully comprehensive, so the goal was to set some baseline actions people could take and expand from there.
As part of the campaign, we've spoken with a lot of different groups to see if they'd like to sign the pledge and those conversations were essential to have in small groups (or even one on one) to figure out what fears and concerns people have, talk through the obstacles they've encountered, and figure out a way forward together. These conversations are key to building the movement's constituency and there needs to be space for making mistakes, learning, and growing. Trying to have those conversations on social media is a recipe for disaster and berating people into joining a movement does not work. To paraphrase the Zapatistas: “Convince; not conquer”.
For the target of the campaign, we use pressure tactics to eventually force them to take an action that we want. Being aware of the distinction between the target of the campaign and the constituency/audience is very important to get right. If a campaign chooses to make everyone a target and does little to no work to grow the constituency and audience, it's bound for failure. Part of the campaign's job is to create a message so people who are unfamiliar with it can take action to help it grow and succeed.
No Games For Genocide took two years to figure all this stuff out before we publicly launched our campaign. It was really, really difficult and we had a couple of very intense conversations. It's not easy, but it is essential to have those if you want a coherent campaign once it goes public.
None of this is required to start a movement, but it can help. Sometimes it's better to just start taking action, you'll never know how it will end up.
What I think we're seeing with the IGF jurors choosing to take a stand against AI and the resulting public response is that the cornerstones of this action are unclear. What's the goal? Who is the target? Who is the constituency? Who is the audience? I struggle a bit to answer all of these.
What's most unclear to me is what actions the IGF jurors are wanting and who they want to take those actions.
I could see any of these as potential goals of the campaign and I'm guessing there are many, many more interpretations by the public. At the end of the letter they released, the jurors stated: “We urge the IGF to adopt a strong anti-AI policy for future years that disallows games containing any AI-generated work.” It feels like they were aiming for a combination of #1 and #2, but the general public's response has been more around #4, #5, and #6. To add on to the complexity, I feel #7 should be the key focus, but it doesn't seem like it is.
The effect of an unclear goal, target, constituency, or audience is that the public will come up with their own. Some have chosen House House as the target, some have chosen game developers who use AI, some have chosen their friends or coworkers. When you're not part of a campaign, everyone looks like a target.
And because most people don't understand what the goal is, how their actions fit into it, and are not well versed in organizing or social movements - every fight feels like a must-win fight. If they can't convince one person or company to not use AI, it feels like an unmitigated failure. Most people don't understand that movements often fail and fail and fail until they finally succeed.
That fear of failure causes each conversation about AI to be incredibly heightened. It's no wonder this week has been exhausting when everyone is having so many emotionally dysregulating conversations.
All that being said, I love that the jurors took this collective action. Their action has catapulted the discussion of AI in the games industry in a way that it hadn't been before (and it was already discussed a lot). People are grappling with some very difficult questions, which I think is fantastic.
I give a lot of grace with campaigns like this because I've made a lot of mistakes in campaigns I've been in, and I know how difficult they are when you're deep in them. I want people to try their best and learn from their experiences so the next time around their campaigns are even better. I want more people to take more actions and for us to support them even when they're messy. Especially when they're messy.
Remember, collective actions often make people uncomfortable and make them rethink things they thought were set in stone and that's good. In that sense, this action by some of the IGF jurors has been wildly successful. Did they achieve their goals? I think it's a bit too early to tell.
One of the big difficulties with fighting against AI is that it is being shoved down our throats from multiple angles by tech companies and our bosses at work. Whether we choose to use it or not is only sometimes an individual choice, but much more often it's a choice with very big negative trade-offs. AI is a systemic issue and has to be treated as such.
Something I would love to see people do is build a campaign against AI in the games industry. Come up with clear demands and actions people could take, then organize together to bring in more constituents into the campaign. A campaign like that would make it much easier for people to take action in the future and understand how their actions build into a wider movement.
The people who build that campaign could work with unions across the world to train and educate workers how to push back against AI in their workplaces. The campaign could create and collect anti-AI policies so other workers could use those as starting points to push back against AI in their own workplaces. The campaign could track the progress of how many companies have signed up to not use AI and could build a community to support the game companies that choose to not use AI.
That is one idea for how to help fight against AI in the games industry, but I'm sure there are many, many other ways to contribute to the movement. Just remember that whenever you're talking with someone about AI, it's important to understand their needs and why they were thinking of using it in the first place. As Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie say in their book No More Police, “Real alternatives meet needs as needs; not through policing in one form or another.”
Thank you Ashley and Nick for your wonderful proofreading and feedback on this essay. <3
